This conceived collection examines aspects of shifting cultural situations, as well as artists whose work challenges the institutional inclination to group artworks according to medium; it is rooted in large scale environmental and performance works. My desire with this exhibition is to experience a revolutionary art form capable of addressing contemporary social and political concerns. I’ve repurposed ten artworks from different disciplines as active elements within an ecosystem, investigating constructs or constraints of the gallery that hamper or assist in the cultivation of multiple discourses.

On the floor in the center of the room lies a catwalk of six evenly spaced glass funnels. Partitioned by a pair of black shoes, the funnels contain ground coal and mercury. Suspended overhead are fourteen copper rods controlled by electronic motors. The Hydra-Forest: Performing Oscar Wilde by Rebecca Horn thus serves as an overture to the exhibition. Paralleling the right side of Horn’s sculpture is Larry Bell’s Untitled, a long thin strip of glass coated with a vaporized metallic compound. The compound materials of Auguste Rodin’s Le Baiser (The Kiss) provide a counterpoint to the pure elements in Horn’s work. It depicts in bronze an embrace between two figures swept away in passion.

•

room 2: communication by environment, art, and viewer.

Robert Smithson, <i>Nonsite (Essen Soil and Mirrors)</i>, 1969

An Te Liu, <i>Exchange</i>, 2001

This room facilitates an active exchange between two works in order to generate new meaning. Nonsite by Robert Smithson features soil from the German city of Essen situated amidst twelve geometrically arranged mirrors. Across the room, An Te Liu’s Exchange monitors the air quality of the gallery in real time via ten vertically stacked high-particulate air purifiers. One can imagine Exchange lifting the noise floor of the room while stirring up and taking in the smallest particles of Essen and patrons alike.

•

room 3: art beyond aesthetics.

Hans Haacke, <i>Blue Sail</i>, 1964-65

Ann Hamilton, <i>indigo blue</i>, 1991/2007

This room contains work by Hans Haacke and Ann Hamilton. Each artist works within a system, implicating viewers in a wider social context. Haacke’s Blue Sail features a single unsettling chiffon cloth suspended above an oscillating fan. Hamilton’s Indigo Blue responds to the labor history of Charleston, South Carolina, with a pile of 48,000 articles of denim. Each garment, individually folded and laid, presents an anonymous trace of labor, evoking a system of organized distribution from the completed structure. Blue Sail functions as a state of pure enunciation, extremely simple in relating the physical properties of material into a dialog with respect to elaborate structures.

•

room 4: disperse.

Eleanor Antin, <i>100 Boots on the Job, from the series 100 Boots, a set of 51 photo- postcards</i>, 1972

If the previous room suggests artists conducting research from within systems, then this room suggests methods achieved by artists taking a vantage point outside of a system. Observers — corporeal, considering — immersed by the surrounding landscape, remain apart. Two very small photos adorn the far wall: one by Eleanor Antin and one by Bernd and Hilla Becher. Each of the two images belong to larger series, sharing oil as subject matter. Across the room, Dennis Oppenheim’s Final Stroke-Project for a Glass Factory is an enormous wavering steel structure. How Final Stroke-Project physically functions is unknown to me, but the appeal of this work came from its gasoline-powered heaters. A small smell of gas or spare operational motor would convey missing olfactory information for the final room.

•

Postscript:

When I see art, I want to investigate the space, and make as many observations as time allows, to revisit multiple times, on different days, in light of new participants and situations. I am looking for a language or truth, for artworks to speak with one another even when no one else is present. To enter the nose as one exits the last gallery is for me unexpectedly thrilling — to be fully open with one’s senses and engage in the present experience. To float with new energy back into space.

Madalyn Merkey is a California-based composer working in computer music. Her interests include managing archives and sound studios in connection to acoustic research.

Paul Wonner, <i>Dutch Still Life with Lemon Tart and Engagement Calendar</i>, 1979

The last few months of winter have found Open Space in something of a state of hibernation, woken only at random intervals by a welcome or surprising contribution from one of our brilliant columnists (to say nothing of the crashing, buzzing, and humming sounds coming from the museum construction work next door). Finally, an alarm clock: We’re thrilled to welcome three (technically four) new columnists, starting this month: poet Trisha Low; writer and editor Matt Sussman; and the curatorial team Unexpected Projects (Jenny Salomon and Jennifer Stager).

We’ve also commissioned new contributions to our regular Open Space columns from Bay Area artists, critics, curators, and other local luminaries. We launch tomorrow with a Collection Rotation from musician Madalyn Merkey. And, just as they saw us through the winter, our columnist alums could post at any time.

Okay — to be honest — the assertion that we’ve been hibernating is something of a stretch. Indeed, as SFMOMA revs up for reopening in 2016, Open Space is in the midst of its own (comparatively quiet) reconstruction. While it’s still too early to divulge details, you can expect to see new features, new columns, and a brand new look come fall. Our dedication to art, community, and culture in the Bay, naturally, remains steadfast as ever.

A few weeks ago here in New York, when it was so cold outside that puddles were frozen in the gutters and lethal sheets of ice clung to the sidewalks, I went to a reading put on by the Rumpus.

It was the sort of chilly hell no sane person would want to go out into.

But that clearly didn’t stop people from going; all of the tables were full by the time I got to the Cornelia Street Cafe.

If you’ve never been, the cafe has a basement which evokes some mythical, smoky jazz club from the 50′s, but without the smoke. To get in you must descend narrow stairs and then push past a soft velvet curtain. Once inside, there’s just enough space to fit a tiny bar, some small tables and at the far end, a stage. Little tea candles provided the only light in the room – except for the stage where the readers got to climb out of the darkness into a bright spotlight. A huge, lush, red velvet curtain hung over the wall behind them, making me almost want to go up and touch it.

Nick Flynn at the Cornelia Cafe, NY. photo: Chris Cobb

As I located my seat, Rumpus founder and editor Stephen Elliott stood and gave effusive introductions for each of the poets. He read one or two poems himself and seemed very happy.

Although the event was supposed to be a book launch for Beth Bachmann’s DO NOT RISE, Elliott’s comments made it feel much more intimate — as if this was just a few friends catching up. And maybe that’s what this really was — just some writers and poets doing their thing, not another snobby Manhattan social climbing orgy, which is all too common here.

Needless to say, the tone of a reading is just as important as everything else and this one had all the right elements.

Interestingly, the cover charge was only eight dollars, which included one free drink (house red or white, or a beer of your choice). I chose a beer, a beer that normally costs seven dollars. As I sipped it, I wondered how in the world they could make money on poetry readings. Then I considered how the bar must now that an audience of poets and artists was an audience of people who were highly likely to have addictive personalities. It’s that first drink, they say, that gets you.

Anyway, once the show started the whole thing lasted only about 45 minutes. That’s with Elliott’s introductions and everyone reading. Just 45 minutes. Not too long, not too short. Real professional. It was just long enough to get you hungry for more — or make you wonder what Nick Flynn meant in his poem when he said “my neck was still cold from where she kissed it.”

As such, the poems flew by with almost no time to linger. Bachmann was the best at slowing things down, because her reading style is to read One. Word. At. A. Time. But it works, making for a nice cadence and her world-weary personality came through. She put so much emotion into every word it was unclear where she was leading the audience, until suddenly the poem was out of her. I felt I had been taken on a wild emotional journey and then wasn’t sure where I was. She wore a great big red bow in her hair.

Beth Bachmann at the Cornelia Cafe with a big red bow in her hair, NY. photo: Chris Cobb

Then it was over.

That 45 minutes was surprisingly quick.

Just as the poets were finishing up their drinks, a wrinkled old man, looking like an actor playing the part of a jazz club owner, came and gently encouraged patrons to exit the place. People needed to leave because — you guessed it — a jazz band was on next.

When the lights came up and people chatted with each other I saw that nobody was wearing an unnecessarily long scarf or too much mascara. This wasn’t the reading to wear high heels to because the ice puddles, like Manhattan’s social life can be very unforgiving.

It was a great reading, an oasis of common sense on a winter night. Hopefully the Rumpus will keep showing New Yorkers how it’s done.

]]>http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2015/03/the-rumpus-pops-up-in-new-york/feed/1http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2015/03/the-rumpus-pops-up-in-new-york/What’s up with stARTup?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/sfmoma/blog/~3/qYHqPEHuosI/ http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2015/01/whats-up-with-startup/#commentsWed, 28 Jan 2015 18:00:01 +0000http://openspace.sfmoma.org/?p=58884This essay was written collaboratively by Joseph del Pesco & Bean Gilsdorf."Unsatisfied with the brevity of Twitter and the isolation of a coffee-shop conversation, we thought it could be productive to post a critical analysis of the fair."]]>This essay was written collaboratively by Joseph del Pesco & Bean Gilsdorf.

Here’s how it started: On December 3, 2014, Bean received a press release about a new art fair called “stARTup,” a joint venture by artist Ray Beldner and former gallery director Steve Zavattero. Bean raised her eyebrows at the application fee and hotel costs, and posted this to Twitter:

Joseph retweeted and a short conversation ensued. The fair’s organizers responded:

Shortly after, stARTup reduced the application fee from $75 to $45.

On December 22nd, after corresponding with Bean via text message, Joseph posted:

Ray & Steve responded to Joseph’s post on Twitter and then emailed to request a meeting. Together they called Joseph on January 5. Bean and Joseph met a few days later and started writing:

Unsatisfied with the brevity of Twitter and the isolation of a coffee-shop conversation, we thought it could be productive to post a critical analysis of the fair. Our goal with the following text is to unpack the marketing rhetoric presented on the website and examine some of its assumptions and implications. We began with a list of stARTup pros and stARTup cons, and developed them into a set of dialectical arguments, meant to highlight debatable points.

First, stARTup sets itself apart from other fairs by creating a system in which “participating artists keep 100% of the proceeds from their own sales.” Artists who have gallery representation often complain that they’re locked into one or more galleries who take 50 percent of sales, but who don’t “do enough” for them to justify such a large cut. This fair eliminates the gallery cut, doing away with the middleman. While this may sound like an improvement, it distracts from the economic truth that artists will only start making money after they’ve recouped the up-front, out-of-pocket costs of the application fee, the room fee, and other related expenses. We’ll revisit this point in a moment.

The press release also asserts that the fair is “an innovative and experimental way to provide artists with access to a professional exhibition environment.” The model for stARTup originated with a fair called Photo Independent (PI), held in Los Angeles in 2014. Indeed, PI presents unrepresented (“independent”) artists, and charges them a fee to participate. Ray and Steve noted they were impressed by the high level of quality at the fair, and pointed out that the fees for stARTup were comparable to PI’s middle range. Fair enough, but we don’t see any innovation here—and hotel fairs have been around for decades.

The press materials promise that the fair will be “populated by dealers, curators, collectors, critics, publishers, and art appreciators,” but with the title “stARTup,” it seems to us a transparent attempt to lure the Bay Area’s newly moneyed Silicon Somebodies by aligning the fair with an entrepreneurial sensibility. Phrases like “get in on the ground floor” aren’t likely to win the hearts and dollars of the start-up elite nor venture capitalists. While we’d all like to see more of the local wealth directed toward supporting area culture in substantial ways, we feel this approach lacks a sense of dignity. The fair’s overview imagines Bay Area artists as “entrepreneurs” or “creative visionaries”; most artists we know would be loath to apply such hollow self-nominations, and the clichés of corporate culture are largely unwelcome by artists. One could argue that stARTup’s marketing is simply a kind of veneer, the platitudes most people understand are simply part of the game; but employing a superficial understanding of the attitudes and interests of the tech community at the expense of the art community is an unproven tactic that threatens to aid neither group.

Most of the artists we know are intelligent, motivated, and capable; but do they want to be cast in the position of primary salesperson of their own work at an art fair? Are they prepared to negotiate with a buyer/collector who wants, let’s say, a substantial discount (a routine matter in collector-dealer relations)? Certainly artists can fend for themselves, and some already have experience selling their own work, but these kind of negotiations can be awkward, or worse, when you’re cornered in a small hotel room. The only imaginable benefit here is the trial-by-fire skill-building for the artists as they absorb the ancillary duties of branding, marketing, interpreting, negotiating, and (hopefully) selling.

The supposition is that the fair is a particularly important opportunity for artists who’ve been ignored or dropped by commercial galleries and arts institutions. Ray mentioned during our conversation that he’s lost gallery representation three times in recent years, for various reasons. Certainly he’s not alone. But it’s worth pointing out that two-thirds of stARTup’s application review panel (four of six members, or 66 percent) is comprised of representatives from galleries and institutions. This doesn’t do away with institutional hierarchies and professional biases. Why should artists who feel they’ve been ignored by these galleries and institutions gamble $45 for the privilege of being ignored yet again?

Let’s return to the issue of cost. To participate in this fair, there’s the aforementioned application fee, then a $2,750-4,000 room fee; undoubtedly there will be other costs: Transporting the work (wrapping/packaging, gas, etc.); installation (hardware, tools, framing); and the often-overlooked costs such as food and other incidentals. And let’s not forget the cost of making the work. By our estimate, the average artist will spend over $4,000 just to show up. To be fair, Ray and Steve told us that three-quarters of the rooms are being offered to artists at the lowest ($2,700) price. As the organizers, they’re risking a large investment of initial capital, expecting that artists will apply and of course honestly hoping and planning for the fair to achieve its most successful outcome. However, it’s worth noting that at the moment the fair opens, the burden of risk will shift from the organizers to the artists.

We respect that Ray and Steve have given more than twenty years of their lives to the San Francisco art scene. Certainly they are taking a risk starting a new business, but we’re more concerned about the fifty artists than the two organizers. Our critical analysis here is not personal, it’s about their business proposition to artists. Finally, Ray and Steve kindly shared their budget with us: we can see that if the rooms fill, the organizers will make a living wage while the artists are will be operating at a deficit. The question remains for us: what does an ethical art fair look like, and is this as close as we can get?

]]>http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2015/01/whats-up-with-startup/feed/27http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2015/01/whats-up-with-startup/Conflict Kitchen: An interview with Jon Rubinhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/sfmoma/blog/~3/xoYTlEXWzbE/ http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2015/01/conflict-kitchen-an-interview-with-jon-rubin/#commentsSat, 24 Jan 2015 21:04:50 +0000http://openspace.sfmoma.org/?p=58874Originally published by Chelsea Haines in Guernica Magazine, this interview with Jon Rubin surveys the recent controversy about the Palestinian iteration of the Conflict Kitchen, and addresses some of the ongoing tensions of presenting art projects about politically sensitive subjects in the US.

Chelsea Haines (CH): What are the criteria for U.S. “conflict” in selecting countries for Conflict Kitchen, and how did you arrive at the idea for Palestine in particular?

Jon Rubin (JR): We’ve always defined conflict fairly broadly from ideological conflict to troops on the ground. For quite some time we’ve talked about a focus on Palestine. Certainly no one can deny that Israel is conflict with Palestine and no one can deny that the U.S. is the largest supporter of Israel internationally—not only financially, but also in the United Nations where the United States is one of the very few countries that does not recognize Palestine as a state.

The criticisms that are often presented to us by some in the conservative Jewish community about our Palestinian version are: first, that the U.S. is not in conflict with “Palestine” (quotes are theirs) and second, that Conflict Kitchen should counter the Palestinian viewpoints it presents with pro-Israeli viewpoints, otherwise we are spreading dangerous propaganda. The contradiction here is fairly obvious; if we are not in conflict with Palestine than why are they so afraid of us presenting Palestinian voices? Of course the answer is obvious, and we see it throughout the U.S. and the world, controlling the master narrative of Israel means vigilantly controlling the narrative about Palestine.

CH: Tell me about your research this summer in the West Bank.

JR: I traveled with our chef Robert Sayre and one of our assistant chefs John Shaver throughout the West Bank in June of this year. When we travel for research our strategy is to simply move from kitchen to kitchen. It’s truly a wonderful way to travel—food shopping, cooking and eating in one home for lunch and then another for dinner. The process of cooking takes us immediately into the rituals and rhythms of daily life and also places us firmly in the position of learners. We were meet with incredible generosity by all of the families we ate with. The trip was also eye-opening, as it is for anyone who travels into the West Bank, because nearly every aspect of daily life is effected by the occupation—from check points and travel restrictions to growing settlements and economic roadblocks.

Our guide throughout was a brilliant man named Mohammad Barakat who lives in East Jerusalem. We’ve continued to work with him virtually via our performance project at Conflict Kitchen called the Foreigner. Each week Mohammad is available to have lunch with our customers through the body of a local Pittsburgher who functions as his real time physical avatar. It’s one of the ways we try to collapse and confuse the space between what is familiar and foreign in the project.

CH: You also always work with the local diasporic community from each country you select. What were your experiences like with the Pittsburgh Palestinian population? How did they respond to the project?

JR: One of the great things about the project is that it becomes a beacon for the local community that we’re focusing on. I met a lot of local Palestinians in Pittsburgh leading up to the opening. It is a small population of about 300 people. Often they are afraid to self-identify as Palestinians because they fear people will see them in a negative light or even because some Pittsburghers don’t know there is such a place as Palestine. A lot of Palestinians here simply say they’re from the Middle East.

On Nov 18th we celebrated the re-opening of the project (after the death threat) with a simple Palestinian potluck at the East Liberty Presbyterian Church. Around 200 people came and brought a homemade Palestinian dish. I met people at that event who had never been to the restaurant and typically don’t publicly identify as Palestinians, but told me if anyone from the media wanted to talk with a Pittsburgh Palestinian, I could give them their names.

Another thing that happens is that the communities we’ve worked with here locally overlap and support each other through the years of the project. We’ve had many Iranians, Afghans and Venezuelans show up for our Palestinian events.

CH: It also seems a crucial part of the project is to connect with people in Pittsburgh who may previously have had little knowledge of Palestinian culture.

JR: When we opened the Palestinian version we had a very long line, and people were really engaged and curious about the food and the perspectives of Palestinians. Our customers are a pretty diverse group and are incredibly friendly and open. After five years of running this project, we’ve definitely become part of the larger fabric of the city. As an artist who lives here and wants a more sophisticated engagement between local social dynamics and global discourse, it’s great to see that reflected via the relationships we’ve developed with our customers. For some people it’s a political act to eat from us three days a week because they recognize they are financially supporting the premise of the project each time they come. 95% of our annual revenue is purely from the public via food sales.

After it became known we received a death threat, people came out to support us and our Palestinian community in a lot of ways. While we were closed people posted statements of support all over our façade, and there were a few rallies where folks came out to express their support for the project and more specifically for the value of Palestinian voices in our community. The crisis afforded a moment for a constituent body to vocalize itself and add more breadth to the conversation around Palestine than was occurring up until that point.

CH: Let’s talk about the events that led to this project becoming so controversial so quickly.

JR: For years we have hosted biweekly lunch hours where expats and experts are invited to be part of an informal discussion with the public around food. For the last two years these discussion-based events have been co-sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Honors College. We decided to co-host an event a week before the opening of the Palestine version with a young Palestinian doctor, Nael Althweib, and a professor from the University of Pittsburgh, Ken Boas, who is Jewish and works on Palestinian human rights issues.

After the program was announced, a representative from the Jewish Federation of Pittsburgh went to the Honors College dean asking him if he knew that he was going to be co-sponsoring an anti-semitic hate speech event. They said that if Conflict Kitchen did not add the Jewish Federation to the event or if the university did not pull their sponsorship they would go to the board of trustees and tell their Jewish members to pull their support for the university. Eventually, after many conversations between the dean and I, in which I stressed the claims were baseless and that pulling sponsorship from an event where a professor from his own university was speaking was a serious breach of academic freedom, the dean agreed to move forward. But, I could tell this was a fight he wanted no part of. What I later found out is that after the event the Jewish Federation went to the provost and chancellor of the university and made the same threats. All of this just to silence free speech about and by Palestinians. The university administration felt caught between a rock and a hard place, and they made the decision to end their relationship with us moving forward.

About 60 people ended up coming to the lunch hour including the dean, members of the Jewish Federation, and we actually had an incredibly civil conversation. Subsequently however, the Jewish Federation along with a few pro-Israel students made claims that the event was rampant with anti-semitism and they felt unsafe. Some said they were not invited or allowed to attend—which was obviously not true.

They then started tweeting and blogging for Israeli newspapers, spreading a highly inflammatory narrative that Conflict Kitchen was spreading anti-Israeli propaganda, hate-filled literature, and even promoting death to Israelis and Jews. This was picked up by media like the Washington Free Beacon, a newspaper run by a right-wing think tank in Washington D.C., then Fox News then Breitbart who were now making the absurd claim that Secretary of State “John Kerry’s Wife Funds Radical Anti-U.S., Anti-Israel Eatery.”

We had received a grant from the Heinz Endowments (of which Theresa Heinz is the Chairman) last year and in response to all of these articles B’nai B’rith went to the Endowment and publically asked them to disavow the grant. At this point things started moving from the fringes of media and political discourse into to the center.

CH: Did the Heinz Endowments contact you before they made their statement?

JR: No, they never contacted us. It was a great opportunity for the Heinz Endowments to take a stand and support freedom of expression, but they chose not to. I think they went into a panicked crisis mode. They gave a statement of disavowal to B’nai B’rith saying: “[the Endowments] want to be especially clear that [Conflict Kitchen’s] current program on Palestine was not funded by the endowments and we would not fund such a program, precisely because it appears to be terribly at odds with the mission of promoting understanding.” The statement went on to say, “[the Endowments] emphatically does not agree with or support either the anti-Israel sentiments quoted on Conflict Kitchen’s food wrappers or the program’s refusal to incorporate Israeli or Jewish voices in its material.” Besides the fact that the Heinz fundamentally ignored the premise of our project, this framing of the viewpoints of Palestinians as automatically anti-Israeli is such a gross over-simplification. Such statements negate the complexity of Palestinian history and culture and perpetuate the most dehumanizing reading of their lives and the silencing of their voices.

The president of the Endowments contacted me the next day, a little late, and when I met with him I pointed out that the actual language of the grant funding was for “future programming,” of which the Palestinian version is a part. So their denial is convenient if not factually inaccurate. Furthermore, their argument that Conflict Kitchen is “at odds with the mission of promoting understanding” is outlandish. What it implies is that if you present the viewpoints of North Koreans, Cubans, Afghans or Venezuelans you might be promoting understanding, but if you focus on Palestine you’re doing the opposite. What does this statement says to our local Palestinian community? Sorry, you hold no power in this city, thus your culture and opinions have no inherent value.

Their other claim, that we refuse to publish Israeli viewpoints or include Jewish voices, is just false. Many of the interviews we did during our research trip were with Israeli Arabs and the first event we organized included a Jewish voice—not to mention the obvious fact that I am also Jewish. Of course, these are not the Israeli or Jewish voices some people are interested in hearing.

CH: Was there anything specific that these critics pointed to that could validate their claims?

JR: Some of the interview statements on the food wrappers are critical of Israeli policy, certainly, but that is also to be expected. The majority of people who come to the restaurant have had no problems with the sentiments publicized on the wrappers.

CH: What I read on the wrappers was a wide range of different responses to the Israeli occupation from the serious to the mundane to even the humorous.

JR: Yes, there are a range of viewpoints and experiences discussed. One statement that the Jewish Federation likes to re-quote with multiple edits and ellipses is where a man in the West Bank that we interviewed speaks about resistance in Gaza: “You’re punishing the Gazans who have been under siege for eight years already. You’re attacking, arresting, and killing guilty and innocent people alike. You have 1.8 million people in an area half the size of New York City, but without proper housing, water or infrastructure, and no way to make a living. They are banned from dealing with anyone outside Gaza. You are pushing them to the absolute extreme. So what do you expect? Palestinians are not going to just let you in and drop their arms. No, they are going to kill and they are going to die. Not because of religion. It doesn’t have anything to do with religion. It has to do with the way they are living and coming of age under this oppression. We are creating and perpetuating a culture of death.”

This is not anti-Israel propaganda; this is one Palestinian’s stark and sobering assessment of the byproduct of systemic oppression on the people of Gaza. And frankly, this is not a story that a lot of people want to hear. But one of the things we feel the restaurant has done fairly well is use food as a way of bypassing people’s defenses in order to pull them into narratives that are sometimes foreign and not always comfortable. It’s also important to note that this interview is presented in the context of many others, not only about resistance, but also about food, marriage, governance and more.

CH: What are your plans for Conflict Kitchen now that you have received the Carole Brown Creative Achievement Award? How do you plan to move the conversation forward with the project as a whole, as well as with the Heinz Endowments, which partially funded the award?

JR: Well, it’s pretty ironic to get an artist achievement award from the same foundation that disavowed one of my artistic achievements (that they had also earlier funded). It’s a goddamn brainteaser. The Endowment had reinforced the worst bullying tactics of powerful lobbying groups and had created a less-secure environment for their own funded project to do its work in. Now, I have no problem with outside organizations and individuals critiquing or challenging the methods of our project, that’s part of the nature of making work in the public sphere. But I do take issue when individuals and organizations seek to police and silence speech. The counter to the call for less speech should always be more speech.

I have decided to put the unrestricted $15k from the award entirely into the current Palestinian version of Conflict Kitchen. The byproduct of this is twofold: First, the money allows me to bring more Palestinian voices into our city and add greater depth to an iteration of the project that I very strongly believe in; and second, this will provide a great opportunity to the funders of this award to stand up against the criticism that will certainly come again their way because of the use of these funds.

During my awards speech, I also put forth a proposal that the Heinz Endowments, and all our local foundations and funders, add a freedom of expression clause to their bylaws and contracts. I mean, it seems like a no-brainer, but they actually do not have this in any of their language. Frankly, in order for us to have a healthier arts eco-system funders need to insulate their relationships with artists from the influence of moneyed interests, lobbying groups, and politics. The funders shouldn’t have to parse their words, or say one thing to one group and another to another. One statement, freedom of expression, end of story. Now, we’ll see if anyone takes me up on that offer. Hopefully, my use of the award funds will put them under pressure to do so.

The other conversation that needs to happen, on a local and national level, is how can we talk about Palestine and Palestinian perspectives in the American cultural sphere. Obviously, its difficult work, but that’s all the more reason why its important territory to negotiate. The Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh recently had to cancel an exhibition with Palestinian and Israeli artists, for different reasons, and we’re going to have a public conversation together to unpack some of the challenges.

CH: Especially following the war this summer, I think we’re at a tipping point where artists and intellectuals will have to start thinking more seriously about Israeli policy and speaking up more in public ways. Anthony Bourdain recently won the MPAC Media Award for an episode of his CNN food travel show, Parts Unknown, and in his award speech he lamented that his entertainment show provided one of the most nuanced representations of Palestinian culture in American media today.

JR: Yeah, we actually had Laila el-Haddad, co-author of The Gaza Kitchen Cookbook, who toured Bourdain through Gaza on that show, come to Pittsburgh and work with us on a few events. She’s a brilliant speaker, and she came with her parents, who are doctors in Gaza and passionate speakers in the own right. Ironically, the World Affairs Council, a nonpartisan organization that has worked with us for years co-sponsoring events, decided to pull their support from Laila’s visit because their board chair happens to also be on the board of the Jewish Community Center, and she was concerned how this would read to that community. Fortunately, we have our own revenue stream, and in times like this financial autonomy is perhaps our greatest asset.

Listen, I agree it is a tragedy that a 40-minute entertainment show is the greatest entry point to Palestinian culture most Americans have had. On the other hand, I’m incredibly conscious of how disassociated many academic discourses and artistic productions are from the general public. I think our own project could be much more rigorous as well, but one of the things I like is how we occupy a place on the street, seven days a week, a daily reminder that a conversation about Palestinian culture needs to be part of our city’s culture.

Jon Rubin is an interdisciplinary artist who creates interventions into public life that re-imagine individual, group and institutional behavior. He is an associate professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University and head of the Contextual Practice area.

Chelsea Haines is a Pittsburgh-born, New York-based curator and writer. She is a contributing editor of Guernica.

In 1938 Henri Matisse completed La Conversation (The Conversation), a vibrant exploration of color and design on canvas featuring two female models clad in couture. This painting, along with many other works in SFMOMA’s Matisse collection, was the focus of my research in preparation for Matisse from SFMOMA, which was on view at the Legion of Honor earlier this year.

In the process of that research, while skimming the publication Matisse: His Art and His Textiles, I came upon an illustration that brought my page-turning to a halt: a photograph of the same purple jacket and harlequin-patterned dress that are featured on the model to the right in La Conversation. Reading further, I learned that Matisse maintained a costume chest in his atelier, stocked with couture gowns for his models to pose in. This exciting discovery instantly prompted further research, and I would soon learn more about Matisse’s longstanding interest in couture, the apparent fondness he had for this particular dress in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and the fascinating history behind the model who wears it.

Parisian couture dress and jacket, 1938. Photo: John Hammond

Matisse’s enthusiasm for fashion most likely grew from an early introduction to textiles during his childhood in northern France. The artist was born in 1869 in Le Cateau-Cambrésis (in a weaver’s cottage), and grew up ten miles south in Bohain-en-Vermandois, a manufacturing and textile town. By 1879, the town had forty-three textile mills producing various fabrics, including dress materials for fashion houses in Paris. In addition, Matisse came from a long line of textile workers: his mother, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all been weavers. At age 22, Matisse left northern France to attend art school in Paris, bringing with him an awareness of fabric and design. The artist claimed that while studying at the École des Beaux-Arts between 1895 and 1899 he “built up [his] own little museum of swatches.”

Although he was not yet collecting couture garments explicitly, by the 1910s Matisse would be surrounded by them. It was during this decade that the artist crossed paths with couturière Germaine Bongard, who rubbed elbows with many artists then living in Paris. During the war years Bongard hosted exhibitions in her boutique, showcasing works by Picasso, Léger, Modigliani, and Matisse, among others. This juxtaposition of modern art with the fashion of the day prompted the gazette Mercure de France to characterize Bongard’s boutique as a revitalized art salon, adding: “The painter Matisse is in ecstasy before the pleats in a skirt, he suggests the right kind of neckline essential to complete the architecture of a dress.” It is believed that Bongard produced couture clothing for Matisse’s wife, Amélie, each season. And when the artist’s daughter, Marguerite, came of age, she, too, received couture wear from Bongard, and purchased couture from other fashion houses as well.

The frocks and accessories collected by Madame Matisse and Marguerite would later join other costumes in Matisse’s atelier. However, the majority of these ensembles would not appear in his oeuvre until the 1930s, during an extremely creative period when Matisse incorporated fashion into his work and began collaborating with an important female model who would remain at his side for the rest of his life.

The focus of the artist’s La Conversation are two female figures stylized in contrasting ways, one in radiant color and the other in black, but if inspected closely, they are in fact strikingly similar. The two figures have more in common than the Matissean nose-to-eyebrow contour line: they were drawn from the same model, Matisse’s long-term assistant and muse, Lydia Delectorskaya.

Born in Siberian Russia in 1910, Delectorskaya became an orphan at the age of twelve, eventually emigrating from Russia to Harbin, China; after finishing high school she moved again, from Harbin to Paris. At age 22, Delectorskaya settled in Nice, France, where she found work as a film extra, a casino dancer, and an artist’s model. Six months after her arrival, Delectorskaya sought work with Matisse, who had been living in Nice with his family since 1917. He hired her as a studio assistant to aid in the preparation of the large-scale mural La Danse (The Dance). Although her appointment would last only six months, Delectorskaya made quite an impression on both Matisse and his wife, Amélie. The Matisses hired her back the next year to care for Amélie, who was in poor health at the time, and to maintain the household.

Lydia Delectorskaya, Photo: Archives Henri Matisse

In her book With Apparent Ease . . . Henri Matisse: Paintings from 1935–1939, Delectorskaya describes how and when Matisse first noticed her as his next model: “[A]fter several months or perhaps a year, Matisse’s grim and penetrating stare began focusing on me … With the exception of his daughter, most of the models who had inspired him, were southern [Mediterranean] types. But I was a blonde, very blonde.” She continues, “Then, one day, he sat down with a sketchbook under his arm and, while I was scarcely paying attention to the conversation, suddenly spoke to me, ‘Don’t move!’ … And soon, Matisse asked me to pose for him.” Delectorskaya would take on an extremely important role in Matisse’s life, first as his model for the next six years, then as a studio assistant, and later as his caretaker until his death in 1954.

In the spring of 1938 while visiting Paris, Matisse and Delectorskaya attended the end-of-season sales in the city’s fashion district around rue de Boétie. Stocking up on costumes for his atelier, Matisse returned to Nice from Paris with an estimated six to ten couture pieces. One in particular was the diamond-patterned skirt and matching purple jacket seen in La Conversation.

Matisse incorporated the ensemble into numerous works, including not only La Conversation, but also at least four drawings and a rhythmic painting completed in 1938. Robe noire et robe violette(Black Dress and Purple Dress) bears some resemblance to La Conversation in that the two female models are posed in similar gowns, seated side by side. In contrast, however, the faces of the two models are left vacant, giving the work a rather raw, sketch-like quality.

One other painting in particular, Deux jeunes filles, la robe jaune et la robe écossaise(Two Girls, The Yellow Dress and Plaid Dress), from 1941, features the highly recognizable plaid skirt on the model at the viewer’s right, although matched with a red jacket instead of a purple one. This switch leads one to assume that Matisse most likely was experimenting with pairing colors; here, red and yellow dominate the canvas. However, the story becomes more intriguing when we consider a photograph of Lydia Delectorskaya in the same plaid taffeta skirt, but wearing a matching plaid jacket. Perhaps, then, Matisse owned multiple variations of the same couture ensemble.

Matisse was commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller in 1938 to complete a large-scale decorative mantelpiece for the Rockefeller apartment on Fifth Avenue. The mantelpiece, known as Le Chant (Song), pictures two pairs of women formed through curved contours and separated by planes of green and black. Although the final work does not overtly portray the plaid-skirted gown, the dress on the model at the top right seems vaguely related. In a study for the piece,the model on the viewer’s right is drawn in what seems to be a more distinct version of the dress, identifiable through the rounded or puffed fabric at the shoulders of the jacket and the striped skirt that hints at the original plaid. But more surprising to me is that the upper half of the sketch almost appears to be a working study for La Conversation, with the placement and position of the models, the outline of philodendrons in the background, and the wide-backed chair behind the seated model at right being the strongest similarities. Although the unique patterned skirt and jacket combination did not make its way into the finished commission, its inclusion in the preparatory drawing further validates that the ensemble was a critical addition to Matisse’s costume wardrobe.

One question that still remains unanswered is the origin of the couture pair. Based on further research with the aid of librarians at the San Francisco Public Library, I found that a handful of scholars believe the plaid skirt and accompanying jacket may have been designed by Elsa Schiaparelli, the Italian avant-garde couturière who worked between the wars. It has been said that Matisse even called the plaid skirt his “Schiaparelli dress,” but this has not been confirmed. What can be confirmed is that the ball-button jacket and Parisian yellow, orange, and purple plaid skirt held a spell over the artist.

Jared Ledesma is curatorial assistant, painting and sculpture, at SFMOMA.

Reproduction, including downloading of Henri Matisse works is prohibited by copyright laws and international conventions without the express written permission of Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

]]>http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2014/11/ledesma-matisse-couture/feed/1http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2014/11/ledesma-matisse-couture/BOOM: Turfing Inspiring The Worldhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/sfmoma/blog/~3/CAL0VW4CUWY/ http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2014/09/boom-turfing-inspiring-the-world/#commentsMon, 29 Sep 2014 18:28:05 +0000http://openspace.sfmoma.org/?p=58663My first two posts on Oakland turf dancing emphasized some of the sites where turfing takes place, or is subsequently shown: from the art gallery, to the Oakland Ballet, to the stages where Johnny Lopez’s TURFinc battles take place. That is, turfing is visible in a number of known venues for art. But there is another site that is critical to this work: the streets of the city. The RIP Oscar Grant video considered the Fruitvale BART station a haunted site of murder and irreparable loss, but also made it a site which hosts the tremendously joyful affects of turf dancing. On any given day in Oakland one might see turf dancing on corners, in plazas, on BART cars—all in a context relatively free from mourning.

In a new video premiering today on Open Space, TURFinc brings us Inspiring the World TURFin in Oakland. While the video is shot in the highly trafficked streets around the Fox Theater in downtown Oakland, the title reminds that for Johnny and TURFinc, this dance is best contextualized as an internationally situated artwork. “My audience is getting better and bigger,” he said in our g-chat interview this summer. “But I want to spread turfin culture to everyone in the world. Turf dancing means a lot to me and we have lots of fans around the world that wish they could be at my events. People that come and experience the events leave with smiles. The whole time they’re having fun watching, and even become part of it.”

Inspiring the World TURFin in Oakland is a fun piece. The four dancers taking up room on the street are clearly having fun. Even Johnny hangs up his promoter’s gloves and solos, with a series of dashing and grimace-provoking contortions. The only potential spoiler of all this fun, the police, are a constant, but on this night benign, presence at the edges of the scene. Unlike RIP211, where the dance was delayed until the cops vanish, this dance is done joyfully, defiantly, directly in front of them.

Some shots show an officer leaning out of the passenger window pointing out a dancer with a big smile on his face. I start to think about what Lopez wrote me, about the ineluctable smile that turfing produces—here, apparently, even on the face of the cop. The biggest surprise perhaps is the conclusion of the video, which shows one of the dancers thanking the cops in the car for permitting them to dance. “You’re good man,” the officer says.

The irruption of turf dancing into ordinary public spaces is one of the key interventions this work makes into the city. But if the confidence of these dancers in the face of the police marks a development from the defiance of the RIP videos, it does not indicate that the police have warmed to turf dancing in general.

In late April of this year, police were called to a BART train at Lake Merritt station. Apparently passengers were complaining about dancers soliciting money on the car. It’s hard to know whether passengers on the train actually complained–what is known is that BART police assaulted and detained a friend of the dancers, an obviously drastic, brutal, and excessive response to public art.

Public space in Oakland has not been conquered—not by the police, not by dancers, activists, artists, rappers, workers. But turfing continues, insistently, to appear in all of the sites in which it has appeared. Artist David Wilson brought turf dancing into the Berkeley Art Museum last year, encouraging the collaboration between turf dancing and other more conventional dance communities in the Bay Area. TURFinc is hosting another battle, at the New Parish on October 25th. And on Saturday, November 15th from 4:00-5:00 p.m., The Lab will host a turf dance battle as part of their 24-hour Telethon.

The day after Inspiring the World was shot, the trade show for law enforcement known as Urban Shield met in the Marriott, blocks away from the site where the video takes place. The four-day Urban Shield event brings 200 law enforcement organizations from around the country to the area. Inside, shoppers browsed t-shirts mocking the murder of Michael Brown, while protests outside the Marriott echoed protests in Ferguson. In other words, the extravagant pleasure of turf dancing, for dancers and the audiences that gather to watch dancers (in trains, on corners, in art galleries) exists in a world where there is frequently not much to smile about.

But on the other hand, there’s something powerful about these smiles. Something that feels important about these stories, right now; something that feels contagious. When protestors in Hong Kong today raise their hands in the “Don’t Shoot!” pose which now figures as a worldwide sign against police violence, we can see plainly the meaning of bodily contortion, the importance of narrative expressed through gesture. Turf dancing exists alongside the ordinary set of gestures and poses; that is, the ordinary time, of finance capital–but it’s a little off. A littly hyphy. A little dumb.

As surely as the sun rises every morning, there was a kind of cosmic certainty that one day Miley Cyrus would start making art. The show made the New York art world pause for a minute, like it did for Jay Z and James Franco before her, and then it moved on. And yet, after seeing her show of tween trinkets glued onto various mannequin heads, there’s a ringing in my ears that won’t go away. It’s like I stood too close to a loudspeaker in a club and all my senses got thrown out of whack. In that confused state I unconsciously gravitated to her mask covered in little toy teddy bears. It seemed to embody every single vacant, empty look she gives to interviewers and every fake smile she flashes for the cameras that follow her everywhere she goes.

“Yes, o.k.,” you might ask, “but is it art?”

Well, I am not sure. That’s the best I can do. Looking at the show, which was squeezed into the lobby area of V Magazine‘s Soho office space, I get the sense that her whole persona is just the product of a clever marketing campaign. Here she is projecting a sex-positive image that radiates “young”, “free” and “independent” as if those are the keywords representing the market segments she’s trying to capture. Again, one might ask: “Is this what passes for art these days?” I still can’t say.

I do know, however, that as the head of a $350 million marketing machine, it’s more likely she has a committee deciding what her party girl persona should wear, how she should act, and what kind of art this figment of the imagination would make, if she made art, if she was real. And here is the committee’s decision – an obnoxious incursion into the art world.

That said, the teddy bear mask was the breakthrough piece for me. Her other stuff I could live without, but this was self-referential enough to be autobiography. Standing there face to face with it, I had the feeling that there might be a warehouse full of this stuff, ready to sell. I imagined a sweatshop of low-paid workers assembling her vulgar charm bracelets. I imagined future controversies over authorship and whether a charm bracelet without the proper provenance could be called an original work or not. I imagined the wrinkles in the foreheads of the auctioneers at Southeby’s.

To put the cherry on the sundae, on top of the icing on the cake, on top of the raspberry and fudge layers, among the bracelets, the clichés, and the dirty words: a glitter-covered fortune cookie message that reads: “You stand in your own light. Make it shine.”

If you follow her on Instagram, as I do (btw she has 12,891,975 followers), it looks like she’s partying harder than Jimmi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Amy Winehouse combined. There is just too much to say about all this, so instead of trying to figure this out all by myself, I asked some art professionals their thoughts about Miley and her art.

On Miley Cyrus and her “art”: Miley has been in the spotlight all of her life and now she is acting out in front of all of us while sticking her tongue out at us and rolling straight to the bank. When I first read her interview about her “Gluing Shit on Shit” practice I rolled me eyes of course. I thought—perfect—this millionaire American celebrity gets to sit around smoking weed and going to town with a hot glue gun. I can only imagine her freaking out that she is running low on glu,e and shit to glue together, while rolling a joint. Maybe Miley visited the Ecstasy: In And About Altered States exhibition at MOCA in 2005, she would have been 12 years old at the time. Hmmm…her sculptures do look like a 12 year old made them, but sadly they were made by a 21 year old stoner. She admits that her practice is drug-induced and they sure do remind me of the RAVE era of the nineties. Please do not let her get her hands on a stick of Fimo. I have not seen her “sculptures” first hand so I can not critique her craft. WhatI can critique are the adults that have allowed her to become the young adult that she is now.

My first thought, Chris, at the first rumblings that she had commenced her “practice” was that is was just the James-Franco-ification of culture. But I think everything that stumblebum does is charmless and butt-ugly, while these are rather lush and appealing. The late Baird Jones would be snatching (pardon the expression) these up, I imagine, as fast as he did the works of Tony Curtis, Anthony Quinn, Elke Sommer, Red Skelton, et al.

I have a limited appetite for artist’s opinions of themselves anyway, so I could do without the discourse. However, her work doesn’t seem, oddly enough, to be coming from any sense of entitlement or cynicism. I’m not tempted to say that this is what everybody else does and that it is, in fact, some subtle x-ray and she’s in on the joke. I see real joy here and some great color schemes. Better than your average sacrificial virgin.

In a way, N.Y. and Miley are made for each other. A show in N.Y. is everything and nothing. Every artist’s dream. Vegas would have worked as well, but [it wouldn't be] as big of a jab in the eye of the stodgy art world from there.

It appears our society is obsessed with the antics of teenagers. I am not very familiar with her work, so I watched a video, what appears to be post-Madonna slut party (with major theft from Queer Camp). Or just post-adolescence being played out and manipulated by the suits of L.A.

My personal mission is to encourage people to explore their creative sides, and to try making art even if they feel like they can’t or shouldn’t, because it’s therapeutic. So, if I’m true to my own philosophy, I can’t judge Miley Cyrus for her shiny, new, plastic art that she glued together while she was hig, using drug paraphernalia and colorful plastic kitsch as her source material. She found a way to express herself and her brand new, drug-positive, raunchy personality through visual art, and the fact that she got a gallery show (and a fashion show) immediately only speaks to the fact that she’s famous. Other Hollywood stars such as James Franco and Shia LeBeouf have also been given gallery shows before they might’ve “earned” it, simply based on their celebrity status. Galleries need all the press they can get, so who can blame a gallery for showing a celebrity’s work? When I see Hannah Montana and Jeffrey Deitch posing for the paparazzi, looking like two flashy peas in a pod, I don’t think “What has become of the art world??” I think, “Typical.” Everyone knows that the art world at large is an overcommercialized shit show these days, and Miley getting a gallery show is a natural next step.

Miley and Me. Okay, so the proverbial pussy is out of the bag- I made Miley Cyrus’s artworks. Yes, it’s true. Miley and I go way back. When I made this body of work, well, she just thought it was real hot the way it transformed both everyday and precious materials into poignant meditations on themes including desire fetish and pleasure, taking absurd common objects that lend themselves to formal and poetic recreation. In fact, when she came to the studio she told me all about Lacan’s opposition between jouissance and the pleasure principle. She explained to me that Lacan considered that “there is a jouissance beyond the pleasure principle” linked to the partial drive; a jouissance which compels the subject to constantly attempt to transgress the prohibitions imposed on his enjoyment, to go beyond the pleasure principle.

So I said, Miley, since you understand the work so well, why don’t we say that you made it. After all, I am just a middle-aged woman and no one pays attention to me*—but if you were the artist, everyone would love the stuff—cause you are a beautiful, bouncing ball of sexual signifiers and folks would pay attention. It would be a great experiment. You can title the pieces yourself and describe it as you like—let’s see if it gets any traction. Well, Miley thought this was a great idea and that it would save her from being a just a pop-pop dumb dumb. And so it has.

In general I think she is sort of obnoxiously adorable. But I have a 15 year old daughter, so I am a little biased. As for a larger meaning? Just another symptom of the overly saturated, overly fast historical moment we live in. Her every move is instantly accessible, so why not exploit that? The stoner chick loopiness is too silly to get overly critical about. As she says, she glues shit to shit. It’s one of the shortest and most honest “artist statements” I’ve heard in a long time.

I saw the work. I was skeptical, but honestly I came to it with an open mind. I was surprised to find that it did not offend my sensibilities. Alas, there are several conversations to be had. We could talk about the state of the art market, the trend of celebrity “instant artists”, or the rise of social media as the foundation and fodder for an artist’s career. What I am most concerned about in this instance is substance. Substance versus creativity as an outlet. Can we wholeheartedly write someone off who wants to make art or express something (anything) in this age? If one has the motivation to produce work, what criteria exists that can measure it as art or less than? I heard a gallery attendant say that he was impressed with Ms. Cyrus’s meticulous glue gun skills, and that she was more hands-on than Jeff Koons. In this light, I feel like we can cut [her] some slack, if a balance is met. In the season of charity challenges, I challenge Miley Cyrus to put her money where her mouth is. If she truly wants to distinguish herself as something other than a “pop pop dum dum”, she should continue to make work with good intentions, focus on real, positive impact and send the body off to auction. Donate the proceeds to art programs for underserved youth, I say.

Hmm, Miley Cyrus, a.k.a. Hanna Montana, has an art exhibit? Well, it might turn out that she is a visual art genius but the huge level of PR noise around such a spectacle makes it impossible for me to care enough to investigate. Is this her true calling, or is she more of a sexy press event for whatever gallery has the luck and/or publicity instincts to host her work? The answer is: who cares! I simply cannot be bothered to do much more than click on a few images a friend sent me about this event. The amount of self-aggrandizing culture news that is sprayed from every corner of the internet makes living my own life free of the hypnotic suggestion of any number of trending issues/people/events next to impossible, and to me this girl who’s become famous for being a sexualized teenager (itself a cliche) is just another fake-important event designed to do god-knows-what for god-knows-who, and it just lowers the signal-to-noise ratio to an unbearable level. Unfortunately, it makes me think that if the art world can deem this person’s work valuable enough to show with a straight face (someone please tell me the face isn’t straight) it makes me doubt the value of whatever else is being shown this week. Maybe she’s a sculptural genius – but there’s just so much other art, music, film and culture that I’ve yet to explore that I can’t see her show being worth the time.

Being an artist is like a sport. As the stupid NIKE advert states, “Just do it.” She is doing it, but she is oblivious to why, and I like this. Except that, like you, I think she is being controlled by others, and would like to just see her make work without being told what to do. I would like to see her use her objects in her music videos, making them while high as fuck, and responding to how she got these materials. I would agree with you that she is not real, but a carefully formed simulation of what some minders tell her to do (which makes me think of Edward Bernays and the creation of public relations).

Dewey Crumpler once said in a round table discussion “the more artists there are the better for our world” and then followed by something to the effect of “Why are we arguing about this?” On the question whether Cyrus’s work is good or bad art. Hmmm.

Tonight, during my conversation with other residence artist, curators, and historians here at the Villa Ruffieux, I did not ask if they liked or were familiar with Miley Cyrus’s work, or even mentioned her. But, a question posed by another participant was, “What were/was the last memorable exhibition(s) you have seen, and why?”

The consensus was that when we are confronted by art work—whether in a gallery, museum, or public space—the question posed to oneself is, “What am I looking at?” Self-imposed inquiry was necessary. I do not get this from Cyrus’s work.

When I saw her work, I thought visual and formal. If she was a student in my three dimensional design course, she would earn an “A” grade and it might help her get into RISD. It looks like Art, is composed well, and has some intense colors that look inviting inside a white cube. The work is held together formally by repetition, pattern, unity and other principles of design that we can point out objectively. But the question is, why and how does it relate to her profession contextually, or as an individual entity? Subjectively, it just falls into the great landscape of the expected. I think to myself “AHA!, ART.” But, as Sam Tchakalian pounded into my brain, “Fuck ART.”

I don’t think that if “I just sit around and smoke weed” (somewhere this was a quoted and attributed to her) with no knowledge of formal composition, design, and abstraction that I would create something as orderly as she has. If I was high, I would create scatterbrained “shit.” But her work is not scattered, but orderly. Her work is not shit (formally), but lacks depth. I don’t get a visceral response from it, or wish to inquire further than “ahh… Art”. She might as well be making paintings of happy sunsets or bricolage with some crafty stuff you buy at Hobby Lobby (shit her fans throw at her while performing in concert), because Hobby Lobby or an art store is where one goes if you make ART. From what I read and the link you posted, my belief is that she seems unhappy, wanting attention and validation (other than from TMZ). There is a need for approval from others. When one is an artist, you don’t give a fuck what others think. She fits this description when making Pop music. The art however sucks, and relies on tested design methods of organization. The work looks like art so it must be ART.

Mark Warmus, photographer and managing owner of Z-Cioccolato, a North Beach candy store

Such niche market art for the MTV crowd has never been something I put any energy thinking about. Any art is going to be aided by wealth and fame but I doubt it will last longer than post-graffiti. The craft of thought is severely lacking.

The RIP videos made by Oakland turf dancing crew Turf Feinz appeared in 2009-2010, commemorating recent deaths of young people in Oakland. It’s been four years or more since most of them were posted, which in turfing time, like internet time, might as well be forty. However, many, if not all, of the dancers in those videos are still dancing in Oakland, still making videos and pursuing their art. They can be seen dancing in a wide array of venues around the Bay Area—from collaborations with the Oakland Ballet, to the many battles promoted by TURFinc to late night BART trains between West Oakland and Lake Merritt.

I interviewed TURFinc founder and Turf Feinz dancer Johnny Lopez this summer over G-chat. I had long admired Lopez’s work as a dancer and tremendously charismatic host of turf dancing battles I’d attended. I asked him about the many styles of dance that influence turfing. “We started as a hyphy storytelling footwork house party dance style and year by year we incorporated every dance style you can think of,” he said. When I asked him to say more about “storytelling footwork,” he said, “Turfin is more than a dance style, it’s a way of life for us and most kidz that experience being in ghettohood in Oakland. So the way you can tell a real turf dancer is by the way they dress, sometimes their music selection, the way they glide, swag, their story, and you can see their struggle while they’re dancing. You can tell by their face.”

I went to an event last summer, a competitive tournament for dancers, at the Firehouse in Berkeley, hosted by Lopez. It was a beautiful day, and a packed house. Poets in Oakland are always making jokes about “poet time,” events with an 8:00 start time that don’t commence until 10—but poets have nothing on turfers for lateness. This special sense of time, though, is critical. Not only are the minutes and hours leading up to the commencement of the battles important opportunities to socialize, network, teach and learn, being “out of sync” is an integral part of turfing itself. Not that the dance is ever exactly separate from the beat. But the best turfers innovate idiosyncratic measures and relate to the beat not as a determining influence but an available, optional accompaniment.

Turf battles are generally comprised of two dancers, each of whom dance two sets. After a coin toss, the winner decides whether he or she wants to dance first or second. Dancers frequently bring their own music. When they finish, a panel of judges decides on a winner. The dancers shake hands, underscoring the contagious spirit of camaraderie—even among opponents—that characterizes these battles. The atmosphere at the Firehouse that day was festive but also familial. Every age group was represented, from infants to seniors, but the median age appeared to be about 19. All of the dancers were male (that day—but there are signs that the genre is finally diversifying are appearing.)

At a break, I went out to the backyard and waited in a long bathroom line. Dancers congregated outside, talking in clusters. The aroma of freshly torched cheeba rose and spread skunky fingers over the ensemble. The wait really was long and I eavesdropped on some of the conversations. Two dancers who had already performed were doing a postgame. One rolled a stupendously beautiful blunt. They were discussing in particular the “story” that one of the dancers had tried to tell in his dance.

That’s what I had in mind when the second half of the show started—story. Pantomime and narrative are two of turfing’s distinguishing strategies. The first battle I saw after the break paired Shinobi and X-Ray, which the video above depicts. X-Ray, representing the B.A. dancing crew, goes first. He looks terrific—a homemade B.A. chain on his neck and an enviable floral bucket hat. In his first solo, the hat is dispensed with swiftly. He starts by accentuating his barreled torso with some provocative and slippery wiggles, but his dance is also dexterous and graceful. At one point, he taunts Shinobi, mimicking the kick Ralph Macchio dispatches Johnny with in The Karate Kid…and then does the splits.

After a meditative, acrobatic, martial-arts inspired set by Shinobi, it’s X-Ray’s turn again. Shinobi sulks off to the corner of the stage with his back turned. X-Ray prowls around the stage, reminiscent of turfing’s supposed etymology (“turf-ing” supposedly stands for Taking Up Room on the Floor). His dance this time is tentative, exploratory, modest. He repeats the belly caressing and takes a few dozen seconds iterating contorted expressive handwork. There’s a kind of dialogue with X-Ray’s hands and that outstanding hat. And then the finale.

Pulling his shirt up, he licks his fingers and pretends to massage his right nipple, looking coyly over at Shinobi, smiling. Shinobi has started to pay attention. After the come-on, and after a couple of minutes of ornate but modest movements, X-Ray bounces across the whole stage, shoving his shoulders up, suddenly in sync with the beat. There’s an immediate sense of relieved tension–a tension X-Ray cultivated without flaunting the process of its production. Everybody erupts. Even Shinobi can’t resist the power of this move in this moment. At turf battles, competition is the structure but solidarity is the rule.

The relationship to the beat is one of the ways in which turf dancing emphasizes an aesthetic of being slightly off, slightly weird, tangentially “dumb” in the specific meaning that term has in Oakland. As the dance moves through different levels of intensity and attention, the beat becomes, if not subordinated, at least temporarily subdued, as dancers glide hats around their elbows and construct elaborately expressive facial gestures. X-Ray’s two sets create a new model of time and rhythm—his final move is a glimpse into the ordinary time where we all began, where one’s body moves in time with the beat.

And maybe this is part of the story X-Ray was telling—I can’t say with certainty. Because turf dances are a combination of body movement and storytelling, the attempt to read the foot and handwork is always a matter of interpretation. And not every gesture is allegorical for something else—part of the story will always be the body in the moment of the dance. Between footwork and story, the narrator is in the present, creating and abiding in the special time of turfing—a time we both instantly access as witnesses, and yet wonder at.

Judy Bloch on movie love masquerading as obsessive duty in REEL, a book from filmmaker, and longtime SFMOMA projectionist, Paul Clipson.

The tiny 35mm film frame (twenty-four pass by per second), in its singularity, evokes all of the big screen’s satisfying fullness. No small screen (say, television or computer) can hope to equal this lovely, fractal facet of cinema. I mused upon this while reading Paul Clipson’s REEL, a disarming work of almost pure obsession.

Accident and intuition figure prominently in Clipson’s repertoire as an experimental filmmaker. It’s safe to say that a rather different side of him comes out in REEL, published by Land and Sea fine art editions. The book collects Clipson’s illustrated projectionist’s notes on some 135 films that passed through his fingers during his fourteen years working as an A-V technician and film projectionist at SFMOMA. And Paul admits, “I would describe my expertise as a film projectionist to be based on acute levels of worry, paranoia, and fear.”

Part of a projectionist’s job is to prepare and inspect the films prior to showtime and make a condition report; in the process, he or she will locate and become familiar with the cue marks before the end of each reel. You’ve seen these marks, even if (as intended) you don’t know it: the white-circled, black-centered blips, also known as “cigarette burns,” in the upper right corner of the screen that the film lab inserts in an exhibition print to alert the projectionist that a changeover to the next reel, ready on a second projector, is imminent. Within seconds. If the projectionist were to miss the cue, it wouldn’t be a pretty picture.

Paul Clipson, book jacket for artist edition of <i>REEL</i>. Look for the “cigarette burn” in each film frame. [Click for larger view]

“Cigarette burn” in frame from <i>Daisies</i> (Vera Chytilová, 1966)

Given SFMOMA’s sporadic film schedule, with staffing to match, often Paul found himself prepping films for an on-call projectionist whose path he might not even cross — and who certainly had not examined this print of this film. How would he or she handle the changeovers?

Some 35mm film projectors have warning bells. SFMOMA has Paul Clipson — worried, paranoid, and fearful. And an artist. For every reel of the film in question, Paul scrupulously described where the first set of changeover cues would appear. And he not only described, he sketched a complete picture of the frame.

Let’s review the setting: He’s at work. He’s inspecting and prepping films for projection and jotting detailed notes to the projectionist. He’s alone with the film, every frame of it. At reel’s end, he takes out his photographer’s loop for magnification, his pad and pencil, and sketches what he sees. What he sees.

For me REEL holds the pleasure not only of recognition, but of transformation, in this case from the medium of a film frame conceived and shot by one person into a drawing made by another. Despite their workaday purpose, Clipson’s notes and sketches are infused with movie love.

At All That Heaven Allows, reel 3, for example, Paul notes: “First white circles appear during wide medium shot of a group of the local waxworks gossiping at Agnes’s party…” (That would be Agnes Moorehead, who plays Jane Wyman’s friend in this Douglas Sirk melodrama.) Notice how, under his perceptive sketch of a split-second of aggression in a foregrounded partygoer, Paul helpfully points to the “highballs” in the suburbanites’ hands.

In reel 4 of the film: “First white circles appear as Jane speaks to her freak son next to Xmas tree in living room — hall and stairs feature prominently in background.” (You can see this sketch opposite Alphaville in the spread at the top of this post.) Paul allows as how his drawing of Jane Wyman “looks more like Claudette Colbert,” but anyone who knows the film would instantly recognize this as a signature Sirk moment: Christmas tree, hall, stairs, ill-meaning children… All that’s missing is the new television set, which, in 1955, is meant to divert Jane from her libidinal intentions toward her tree trimmer, Rock Hudson. But Clipson plays by the rules: no white circles, no TV.

Clipson’s sketch alone can tell the deep story, the more so if you’re in there with him: Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig) is unmistakable, implacable in her plaid housecoat, her back turned to us in her kitchen. The wallpaper, the potatoes, the son, the— missing second reel! Oh no. But Clipson’s verbal dispatches to his mystery projectionist can be sketchily profound as well, and I found myself hoping they were received in kind. For Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, reel 2, under the penciled close-up of the artist (Nigel Terry) “looking upwards with fatigue,” Paul points to tear-like drops and asks, “paint or blood?”

Paul Clipson, “Biker dude standing in the far distance of a shadowy hallway…,” in <i>REEL</i>

In fact, aspiring film nerds might play a game with this book: guess the title, extra points if you guess the reel number.

[A] “Biker dude standing in the far distance of a shadowy hallway…”

[B] “Fred stands in an interior long shot, holding his hat in hand and looking forlorn, misbegotten, or just lost… or maybe he’s just about to walk out the door… (moment of tension).”

[C] “Beautiful long shot of tunnel interior… Not much else to note, except that the look of filth & pollution in this tunnel is frighteningly real!”

Paul sees the book, organized alphabetically by film title, as a kind of exquisite corpse, and to the extent that each entry in the Surrealists’ game has a startling revelatory quality by virtue of random juxtaposition, we’re back to accident fueling intuition. REEL fits precisely into its author’s body of film and other artwork.

The aptly surnamed Clipson is fascinated by the very fact, history, and future of the “cigarette burns” on 35mm film, particularly as they are a fast-disappearing anomaly in the age of digital cinema. To that end he has put together and exhibited a twenty-minute DVD of found video clips in which the original film’s white circles appear, drawing from titles in the book. Almost by definition many of the video clips are old and grainy or blurry. But in this exquisite corpse you might find a clue to the mystery of a magical medium: what the ends of movie reels can tell us.

Judy Bloch is managing editor in the SFMOMA Publications Department. She wrote for the Pacific Film Archive for many years and is still happiest when the lights go down and the film comes up — in 35mm.